Dance of Shadows
by Fred Chappell

Fred Chappell’s story “Hooyoo Love” appeared in our Oct/Nov 2003 issue. He returns now with a fantasy concerning dealers in the shadow trade. This story is part of a series, but the first story—slated for publication in Weird Tales —might not have appeared yet. Fortunately, you need not have read the first story in order to appreciate this one.

* * * *

Astolfo, sometimes grudgingly admired as preeminent master of the shadow trade, is avidly sought out by collectors. His attraction is his genius, for he is not physically prepossessing. He will say to me, “Falco, must you loom your bulk over me so lubbardly?” Yet I am but half a head taller than the plumpish, sparse-haired, nimble man and my weight, at about fifteen stone, cannot be much greater than his. It is my office to take all such comments, including the many others more acerbic, in good part, for after all, it was my own conceit to apprentice to him. Four long seasons I had been trying to learn the skill, craft, and finally the art of shadows and if I were to advance in my ambition, Astolfo must be the one to teach me. I felt now almost as muddled as at first, when I broke into his mansion to prostrate myself before his tolerance and be taken into his service.
He once spoke a little in general about the vice of collecting. He seemed to be talking at idle random, but I found out early that he never spoke desultorily. “For it is a vice, you know,” he said and looked at me with that gray-eyed gaze that so rarely gave away the cast of his humor. “I have known many a man to waste his substance upon trifles. He may bestow a fortune upon a trove of essence-bottle stoppers, upon elegant sword-hilt pommels, upon coins of fabled nations in fabled ages past. Then these connoisseurs expire in mortal fashion and their impoverished descendants scatter those spurious treasures to the round of the compass for a fraction of the true worth. This collecting, Falco, is a costly vanity.”
“I take it that you make an exception for the collectors of shadows.”
“Shadow collectors may be the worst of the lot,” he replied. “For not only do the objects themselves extort fat prices, but a discriminating taste for them is difficult and expensive to acquire. And then there are the further costs of proper care and storage and restoration when that is necessary and possible.”
“Yet you derive some large part of your income from collectors.”
“Ah.” He sighed and blinked. “I lead a superfluous existence. And I cannot fathom why you feel attracted to such an inutile way of life.”
I might have talked at length of the fascination that the business of shadows held for me, why it stood in my mind as the subtlest, cleverest, most demanding method of maintaining oneself. But I also knew better than to give my sharp-tongued mentor reason to ply me with sarcasm. I only inquired what he thought he might occupy himself with otherwise.
“Why, I should retire entirely from commerce,” said he, “and devote myself to the close study of the ancient mages. I would strive to achieve equanimity of mind and equability of temper. I would exercise to be always cheerful in this world of futile strife.”
“Most who know you would say that you have already arrived at the goals you aim at. You are hardly a melancholy man.”
“A long face discourages custom,” he declared. “If my clients see me downcast, they may suspect I fret over an unsound business and carry their trade elsewhere.”
“So then, your talk is not pure philosophical disquisition. We have a venture in hand, do we?”
“We do.” He had not objected to the plural pronoun.
“And it has to do with the pursuit of shadow collecting?”
“As soon as you have made your appearance presentable to polished company, we shall go to the house of Ser Plermio Rutilius,” Astolfo said. “I shall tell you about him as we travel.”
“Will Mutano accompany us?” I asked. If Astolfo felt the need of his mute, large manservant so fierce in combat, we might be entering a situation of some danger.
“No,” he replied. “If our host saw the three of us together he might doubt of my capacities. You shall answer well enough as a diverting companion and no more than that. He will see that you are harmless; Mutano does not readily present that aspect.”
I bowed acquiescence, hoping he would note that my ironic grimace expressed disagreement.
* * * *
Our travel was accomplished in handsome style, for Ser Rutilius had sent a well appointed coach-and-two to Astolfo’s mansion to fetch us the two leagues to his chateau. As we rolled smoothly through the green springtime countryside, Astolfo informed me that our host was the scion of an ancient race of warriors who hired out to duchies, principalities, and kingdoms to protect them from marauders, enemies and friends alike. Since our province of Tlemia had blundered into peaceful times, there had been naught to occupy the hereditary skills and services of Rutilius. And so, as a young man, he had entertained himself with dissipation, gathering from cellars their sumptuous wines, from tailors their most costly and elaborate cloaks and doublets, and from noble families their comeliest, most complaisant females.
“In short,” said Astolfo, “he led such a life as you have dreamed of leading, Falco—idle pleasures following upon one another like raindrops in a sweet shower. And do you not dream of it still?”
I did not respond.
“But Rutilius is an intelligent young noble and in due season found these devices to pall. He educated himself in the sciences and the arts. He raised the farming practices of his estates to extraordinary levels; he has renewed and refined his martial skills; he has become a knowledgeable connoisseur of painting and tapestry, statuary and architecture. His senses and apprehensions having become so acute, it was perhaps inevitable that he should come to pursue shadow collecting, for no other cultivated attainment is so difficult to achieve. But, as it is the most expensive of such follies, so is it the most rewarding, for, as you have discovered, it is infinite in interest and delight.”
I would assent to this latter assertion while envying the fact that one in Rutilius’s station could become an adept of shadows without enduring the physical discomforts the discipline was inflicting upon me.
Astolfo seemed to have overheard my thought. “You must not think him some soft-handed, sweet-scented dilettante. He is an expert swordsman, an avid huntsman, a canny and alert man of business, and a fearless pugilist. Of his prowess with women I have heard nothing. Perhaps one of your town wenches has whispered to you whereof.”
I shook my head.
“Well then, we understand that whatever commission he may propose to us must be a tangled one because the man himself is so very able and has such deep resources to command.”
“Yes,” I said, “and from these resources he can well afford whatever toplofty fee you may ask.”
“It is for that reason we have come,” Astolfo said, “for I am well past the age when mere difficulty itself is an attraction.... And so, here are we.”
The carriage rolled to a stop, the driver opened the door and assisted us down the gilt steps he had deployed, and we stood in a pleasant greensward before the great oaken doors of the chateau.
* * * *
We were brought to the presence of Rutilius in a foyer almost immediately inside the doors. The foyer spread large, with a high, arched ceiling of cedarwood, and enclosed a circular area three steps below the main floor. This sunken space contained a small pool lined with blue tile in which red and silver carp wafted long, filmy tails. Flowers and trailing vines spilled from the mouths of sand-cast urns. From an adjoining room a lute not visible to us was being played with gentle and pensive hand.
I had thought that the mansion of Astolfo, where it stood with its gardens and lawn and stable near the center of the port city of Tardocco, must be close to the apex of luxury. Now I knew that however large the fortune Astolfo had amassed, it was to the fortune of Rutilius as a ploughman’s handful of seed is to a granary.
But Rutilius showed himself, however, as no pompous or overbearing sort. A slender, sandy-haired man in his mid-thirties with a manner easy and open, he seemed sincerely pleased to acquaint himself with us, though I noticed that he did not offer his hand. Yet his ease in his station was so confident that this oversight bore no hint of arrogance. He did offer the customary welcoming glass of wine, as fine as any I have tasted since.
The preliminary conversation consisted of our host and Master Astolfo trading reminiscences and guarded confidences about mutual friends and acquaintances. Ser Rutilius was sounding out Astolfo for his society connections, inquiring about the health of Princess A and the new foal in the stable of Count Z. The shadow master bantered his way through this testing, showing familiarity with the persons and affairs of one and all, but without giving impression he gossiped.
Rutilius broke off these preliminaries sharply. “Have you some inkling why I desired to meet you?”
“I have supposed you wished to acquire my services.”
“Do you know in what regard? You must answer this question truthfully.”
“I have no slightest notion,” Astolfo replied mildly.
An expression of relief passed over the face of the baron. “I am pleased to hear you say so. I have feared that my comportment of late has given me away. There are those who observe me closely for any sign of weakness.”
“Ah then,” said Astolfo, “now I shall suppose it is some affair of the affections. I must tell you straightway, Ser Rutilius, that I am no mender of broken hearts. Nor, come to that, am I a broker of mended hearts.”
“In neither case could I use your skills,” Rutilius said. “But come along with me to another room. Let me fill your glasses once more and you shall fetch them with you.”
“Thank you. It is a inspiriting vintage,” Astolfo said.
Having regenerated our drink, Rutilius led us from the foyer down a long, tapestry-hung gallery and brought us into a small salon. Intricate carpets smothered large areas of the parquetry floor, ensuring a sleepy degree of quiet. Large windows admitted southern light and gave an impression of openness to the room. But it was the walls that we had come to see. Paintings and drawings covered them in close profusion. Some paintings were life-size portraits; some drawings were not much larger than Astolfo’s leopard’s-head belt buckle.
I marveled at them. The portraiture of shadows is the most demanding and delicate of the pictorial arts and the most skillful of artists might labor an arduous season to produce even a mediocre rendering. Here every example was a masterpiece. One or two I recognized from engraved reproductions in books, but all the others were new to my eyes and this first impression of them all together made the hairs stand up on my wrists.
Astolfo, whose constant watchword was nil mirari, gave over to rapt admiration, going from one frame to another, stepping forward and back, cocking his head to one side, shading his eyes with his left hand. I had never before seen him so avidly engaged and wondered if this display might be partly a show of manners, a way of complimenting Rutilius on his taste.
I also noted that the baron observed Astolfo attentively and seemed gratified when the shadow master kept returning to one drawing. Among the other, more imposing pictures, this one at first looked none so remarkable. It was no larger than a sheet of foolscap, a rendering of the shadow of a female in graphite and chalk. But the more I looked at it, the more it unfolded not only its artistic beauties but also an ineffable, closely personal charm that must have derived from its subject.
In spite of all the instruction Astolfo has set me to, the examination of scores of paintings and drawings in the collections of his clients, the volumes of prints and engravings, the crabbed treatises on the pictorial art, I have not sufficient knowledge to speak with any wisdom. I believe anyhow that pictures speak for themselves and much that is said in their presence by ink-smeared daubers and chalky schoolmasters is so much vain bleating. I would rather hear a goat fart than to listen to doddering know-alls speak of composition, impasto, contrapposto, and the other drivel.
From Astolfo’s scattered remarks, however, I learned some good, practical sense, especially in regard to the picturing of shadows. First, he told me, your shadow artist must learn how to show volume, the dimensions of bodies in space. It is a childish error to see shadows flat, as unlit two-dimensional strips pasted to surfaces. The first task is to see that for all their seeming insubstantiality shadows have volume and extend round in three dimensions, to which—unlike solid bodies such as stones and trees—they add another surface borrowed from the ultramundane source to which they are allied. At the time, I could not see what he was asking me to see, but to this simple-seeming drawing his words fitly applied. The contours of the figure seemed to rise from the sheet on which they were limned. The shadow was modeled on paper as if it were a study for a sculpture in bronze or glass.
Astolfo spoke to Rutilius in a voice even milder than usual. “I take it that these works represent properties in your possession.”
“All but a few are renderings of shadows I have gathered,” Rutilius replied. “There are one or two works I acquired for their excellence as art. Some of those are quite old.”
“Indeed,” Astolfo said, “for I see that some were signed by the artists. There is a Manoni by the door and in the painting next to it the little salamander scrawled into the corner of the canvas is the sign of the celebrated Proximo. But the newer ones are unsigned.”
“Shadow artists discovered that noising their names abroad was unsafe practice,” Rutilius said.
“Yet there are some so skilled, so deep-thoughted, so individual that their work speaks their names. For instance, that drawing of the young female’s shadow must have come from the hand of Petrinius. He is our contemporary genius of shadows and his touch is unmistakable.”
“You are correct.”
“I see too that this drawing is fresh. You must have come by it recently.”
“He completed it only a sennight past.”
“And the shadow itself is in your possession?”
“It is.”
“I congratulate you. That shadow is a treasure to make any collector proud.”
“Proud, perhaps. But not entirely happy.”
“The reason?”
“I have a great, an overweening, desire to know what woman cast this shadow and where she is.”
“Did not your purveyor tell you these things?”
“He did not know, for the one he got it from did not. It is possible that it passed through many hands before it came into mine.”
Astolfo stepped forward and leaned for a closer view of the drawing. “Perhaps. It is difficult to tell from a drawing. If I were to see the original—”
Rutilius said, “Before I chance showing the property I shall need to know if you accept my commission and what your terms may be.”
“You wish me to find out about the person who cast the shadow?”
“I want you to find her, the woman herself, and tell me who and what and where she is.”
“I can accept your tender only provisionally,” Astolfo said, “because I cannot foresee what may be involved. A tedious, long search might be necessary and might prove fruitless.”
“True enough. Yet you are the most experienced hound in the kennel to set upon the trace. Your renown must have been well earned. And you should be fitly rewarded.”
“Provisionally, then—yes. Let us see the original. Then I may say more.”
* * * *
In this other smaller salon that opened off the collection room, I could discern that Astolfo admired the way in which Rutilius tended his shadows. Some collectors and dealers believe that shadows should be put away in secret recesses—closets, armoires, cellars—so that the surrounding darkness might keep them fresh. But darkness drains them of vitality, gradually absorbing a little of their natural vigor. A dim light is best, light that is not a steady glow but a fluctuating or flickering convergence of beams. These varying conditions keep the shades exercised, furnish them tone, and lend them suppleness. Their odors keep cleaner in a light like unto that of an overcast day and their edges are less likely to lose definition than if they are stored away in some dank hole.
For his most dearly prized shadow Ser Rutilius had ordered the construction of a special cabinet. It was a hand taller than myself and its glass sides enclosed an array of lightly smoked and unsmoked mirrors where the shadow floated among them in an ever-changing, vague light. These mirrors revolved slowly by means of a clockwork mechanism attached to the side of the cabinet. The shadow hung amid their surfaces like those carp wafting in the tiled pool in the foyer.
Astolfo walked three times round this cabinet, leaning this way and that to see the different angles. I could tell that he was considering how he might construct such a machine himself. I noted too that his gaze often left the glass box and its shadow to take in Ser Rutilius.
The baron must have looked upon this sight some thousand times and more, yet now he stood transfixed, again devouring it with his eyes. He had hooked his thumbs into his brocaded linen sash and his fingers played restlessly, hungrily, upon the band of cloth.
Well, it drifted there in ineffable beauty. There was about it such refinement and grace, such a lilting freedom, that it lightened the heart. Astolfo has described some of the most beautiful of shadows as being music, and, to speak in that vein, this one was a cool, clear soprano aria of purest tone. I was not so deeply enamored of it as our host; my taste is for the darker shade, the more satin-like texture, the deeper fabric. But for those who prefer the shadow that verges on the edge of disappearance, an image that is but the whisper-echo of an image, this shade was paragon. And it required some time well after Astolfo had finished his examination before our host was able to tear himself away.
“Any collector,” Astolfo began, “of the greatest wealth or noblest blood, would consider this shadow his crown jewel.”
“And so for me it is—and more than that,” Rutilius replied.
“Your love for the object has persuaded me,” Astolfo said. “I will accept the commission, as long as I am not bound to guarantee favorable result.”
“And your fee?”
“I cannot tell that yet, but it will not discommode you.”
* * * *
In the coach as we rode back to our manse, Astolfo said, “This is to be a delicate business. We must tread gently. We shall have to require from Ser Rutilius a bond for our safety from his hand.”
“Why should he wish to harm us?” I asked.
“Because lovers are madmen and may do violence in a passion. Did you not see how he looked upon the thing? He is in love.”
“With a shadow?”
“In his mind he sees beyond the shadow.”
“How so?”
“He has imagined the woman who spilled upon the air so graceful, so lissome, so lyrical a shade and this picture he has imagined has fastened upon his heart like a kestrel taking a minnow.”
“You make him out a blushing virgin,” I said, “but someone of his position—”
“A man who has had his fill of women in the flesh, who has tired of their jangle in his ear, their depletion of his purse, their weight upon his loins, may perhaps seek a different and higher experience with a shadow-woman.”
“The caster is no shadow. She is flesh and bone like the rest of us.”
“Flesh and bone, yes—but not like you and me.”
“How do you mean?”
“What sort of person will cast so delicate a shadow?”
I pondered. “Some saintly lass, maybe. An ascetic student or a devoted temple maiden.”
Astolfo nodded, but his expression was dubious. “A prophetess—except that those figures rarely attain to gracefulness and when they do, their grace is in a strongly individual, eccentric mode. The movements of this shadow have a high degree of finesse unavailable to the temperament of the hermit.”
“You speak as if you have formed conclusions as to the identity of this female.”
“A thin conjecture, no more. Let us try to lure the artist who drew the shadow to our dinner table for tomorrow eve.”
“Petrinius? He will not come. He is said to disdain all company but his own.”
“And even with that he is none too pleased. Yet I think he might make an exception for our invitation. At any rate, we shall send it round.”
* * * *
The silent, broad-shouldered Mutano ushered Petrinius into the large library where Astolfo and I stood by the great fireplace awaiting his arrival. It was too warm an evening for fire so Astolfo had ordered the hearth-space cleared and had installed small marble genius-of-flame statuettes within. From various rooms and corners of the mansion he had brought all his best works of art—paintings, drawings, tapestry screens, ceramic fooleries, ornately bound books—and distributed them around the room. He evidently thought it worth trying to impress our distinguished artist guest.
He even began, after the usual greetings, to make a witty speech of welcome, but Petrinius cut him short. “I came to eat your meat and drink your wine and to hear what sort of business you have with me, Astolfo. Let us not waste the hour with rhetorizing.”
He was unperturbed and held Petrinius in one of the mildest of his mild gazes, unruffled by the artist’s calculated gaucherie, a commodity he seemed to possess in abundant store. Petrinius was a short, almost dwarfish man whose gestures were swift and jerky. I could imagine him as a marionette whose strings were manipulated by a palsied puppeteer. He abounded with nervous energy; it crackled from him as from amber rubbed with lynx fur. His fingers twitched, his feet stuttered on the worn carpet. When he spoke, the words flew like darts and when he was silent his face betrayed his every thought and impulse in a succession of grimaces. One of the popular sobriquets bestowed upon him was “Candleflame,” and he did indeed flicker with a fiery spirit, every motion animated.
“I am pleased that you have come to drink my wine,” Astolfo said. He poured from a dragon-spout flagon a draught of aromatic inky wine for each of us.
Petrinius tossed his down his gullet and at once held forth his glass to be filled again.
“I feel no urgency to broach my question,” Astolfo said as he poured the proffered glass to the brim, “for I believe you already know what I wish to ask.”
Again, Petrinius drained the draught with one noisy swallow and again put forward the silver-enchased goblet. “This will be in the matter of the drawing commissioned by Ser Plermio Rutilius. Am I correct?”
“You are correct,” Astolfo said. He smiled gently as again he filled the glass.
“I do not think we can content each other. I have no real knowledge of the shadow to impart and the little I do know must come at a cost to you. I believe you already divine what that would be.”
“A certain shadow,” Astolfo said, “or, more accurately, a portion of it.”
“Yes.”
“It must be that you are still designing your great mural. What is the title you have given this long-planned masterwork?”
“At present it is called ‘The Dead Who March to Shame the State.’ Tomorrow it may take a different name. What do you offer me for the bit I can tell?”
“Of the shadow of Malaspino a cutting two fingers’-length in breadth. More, if your replies answer to my desire.”
“What, then?”
“Do you think Ser Rutilius says true that he knows nothing of the provenance of that shadow you so brilliantly sketched?”
“Do not spend your breath upon flattery. I am aware of my capacities. It is in the interest of Rutilius to tell the truth. Why should he deceive you, his hireling, in the matter?”
Even the mean term, hireling, did not discompose Astolfo. “The way of shadow-dealing is as crooked as the shaft of the Great Wain. Did you form any surmises about where it came from?”
“Let us forego catechism,” Petrinius said brusquely. “These things I know from observing the object itself: It passed through few hands before it came to Rutilius; it is fresh and without wear or soilure; its character is distinct. I would think the thief entrusted it to a middleman with Rutilius in mind as the sole buyer.”
“The one who took the shadow was no thief by vocation or the middleman would have gained the name of the caster from him as a means of protecting himself.”
“Of course, of course.” Petrinius waved an impatient hand. “It implies too that the price the middleman obtained and the shadow he kept for himself were of secondary importance to the taker. He wanted chiefly to be rid of the thing.”
“Yet not from fear, for the shadow is that of a young woman who could offer little harm.”
“Unless she had lover, brother, or some other protector who would pursue the taker.”
Astolfo nodded. “And yet—”
“And yet sufficient time has passed and no one has appeared. And I have some conceit that the lass might be an outcast or orphan.”
“A slave girl, mayhap?”
“She is no clumsy bumpkin like your man here,” Petrinius said, with a quick contemptuous gesture in my direction. “She has a grace not entirely inherent. She has been cultivated after some fashion.”
“As I thought also.”
“You have thought already all the things I have said. Did you call me here merely to annoy me? Lead me to the table. I will eat my fill and depart.” He held out his goblet again.
Astolfo complied, saying, “We shall dine on trout and sorrel, lamb and flageolets shortly. The cook must set his own time to bring us to table. I promise you will not regret his tediousness in the matter.”
“Even the most savory of meals is but fuel for the body’s brazier,” Petrinius said. Then he looked directly into my face and I saw for the first time that his eyes were of different colors, the left an opaque, steely gray, the right a brilliant ice-blue. “Has this briar-muncher learned the difference between mutton stew and oat straw? He would seem to be ill fitted for your machinations, Astolfo.”
“Oh, Falco does well enough. He only requires a bit of polish.”
“As does mule flop, but polish never alters its value.”
“At what weight would you estimate the shadow’s caster?”
“No more than eight stone. She will be right-handed, though in walking she will favor her left side. The bones of her arms and especially of her feet will be prominent, her instep a high arch. She is capable of swift movement and also of holding a set pose for a long while. The carriage of her shoulders is almost military in its steadiness and serves to emphasize a long, graceful neck. Her hands are puzzling to me; sometimes I think them too small for her body, sometimes too large.”
“How was the shadow stolen from her? Forcefully, with a sudden violence? Or slowly and carefully, when she was unaware?”
“Not by violence. And yet not gradually either. The edges are not abrupt, yet neither are they vague in boundary.”
“I will give over three finger-breadths of the shadow of Malaspino. And now we have done with this subject and you may speak at length of the plan of your mural.”
“It is to be dark, gloomy dark, in its center. Only the shadow of an evil man taken from him as he stood upon the gallows will supply the necessary blackness. You were on the scaffold with Malaspino, were you not? I have heard the rumors.”
“Since all excepting myself now are dead, I can affirm them. I bribed one of the hangmen to keep at home. I wore his robe and the filthy hood he lent. It was his duty to bind the feet of Malaspino just before the trap was sprung and when I knelt to the bonds, I slipped the shadow away at his bootsoles. I have never seen so black a shadow. The doomful poet Edgardo has been using minute parts of it as an admixture to his inkwell for some time now and his lines grow ever more ominous and sardonic.”
“You allude to his poem, ‘Chance,’ of course. ‘Bow down before the daemon of the world—This monstrous god, half idiot and half ape....’”
“And to other poems he judges too bitter for auditors of our generation.”
“Methinks he too much prides himself,” Petrinius said. “Let him bring them at will, I shall swill his strongest alcohols.”
“Since your appetite is so keen, let us go in to dinner,” said Astolfo. “My nose tells me the dishes are in readiness. We must speak more of your great mural.”
* * * *
He was not loathe to do so. Between bold goblets of wine and weighty forkfuls of meat, Petrinius spun out at length his scheme for his beloved project. The name of it kept changing as he warmed to the subject. Sometimes he called it The Triumphal March of Justice Upon the Contemptible Species; another time it was The Furies Well Deserved, or Look Upon Us for What We Are. It was to be his revenge upon history as he knew it, upon life, regarded more as a crime than an affliction. “There shall appear upon my wall figures who will recognize their shames and wail in anger.”
“‘Twill be a most passionate masterpiece.”
“Passion, yes, passion!” Petrinius sputtered fragments of lamb. “I shall put into it all my brimstone heart and all the skills of hand and eye.”
“Will not the images you thus produce work ill upon the actual subjects?” Astolfo asked. “For I have heard it told of Manoni his art was so powerful that when he drew in ill will a person’s likeness, that one fell sick. Some, they say, came near death.”
“Pah.” Petrinius took a generous swallow of wine. “Those are legends merely. Old superstitions. And I am not certain that Manoni deserves all his musty repute. I can show you clumsy passages in his best work.”
“So then, it is not true that an artist’s portrayal may alter the condition of his subject? I had always heard otherwise.”
“It is not true, though many of the brotherhood promote the falsity. But of shadows, however, it is a truth. It can come about that the portrait of a shadow can affect the appearance of that shade, for good or for ill.”
“I see. Is it the passion of the artist which effects this result?”
“That is one of the things, but now I perceive you work to worm secrets from me. Yet I am no longer thirsty or hungry and so will depart.”
“Mayn’t we tempt you with one thing more? A sweet wine of the Sunshine Isles? A fresh melon?”
“Useless to squander fine manners on me, Astolfo. I bid you good night.”
* * * *
After Petrinius had taken his brusque and slightly tipsy leave, brandishing happily above his head a moleskin packet containing his patch from the shadow of Malaspino, Astolfo proposed that we go into the small library for a last glass to invite slumber. Mutano was already there and sat at his ease by the writing table. A decanter of sherry and three small glasses stood ready.
At first Astolfo and Mutano conferred in one of their finger dialects with which I was unfamiliar and I wondered what their discussion concerned. Astolfo poured and we sipped in a momentary, contemplative silence. Then he turned to me: “What did we discover this evening?”
“That this Petrinius is eager to have his ears boxed,” I said. “His artistry, however estimable on paper and canvas, does not extend to courtesy.”
“Yes, he too referred to you as a cowherd chaff-brain. You are recognized in every place.”
“Under your tutelage I shall become an urbane scholar, a polished wit and silken murmurer of vain compliment,” I said. “You shall yet be proud of your creation.”
My little sally must have caught him unawares, for he paused to consider. “There might be something in this wide apprehension to your advantage. It is rarely a mistake to appear less able than you are. The more willing others are to think you a fool, the more you should strive to appear so.”
I nodded. His words strengthened my hope that our association might yet continue for a while.
Astolfo went on: “What physical attributes did you observe that would contribute to his power as an artist?”
“I am surprised at his comportment. He is a creature of jerks and starts, wriggles and itchings. He contorts his body as continually and absurdly as his facial expressions, yet his drawing is easy and gossamer; it seems to have been breathed upon the page.”
“We cannot suppose that the man who swills grape and wolfs dripping at table is the same as he who stands before the easel. Once he engages the discipline of his craft, his demeanor and personality will change. The priest who expounds a pious and arcane theology in the morning is not the same as the identical priest you encounter that evening in the drunken brothel.”
“He coils and uncoils like an adder in embers.”
“To aid his way of seeing. Did you not take notice of his eyes?”
“They are of different colors.”
“The clear blue is quick and precise. The left eye, colored like the iron of a dagger-blade, was shattered blind in a street brawl. He has to move his head continuously to see things in the round. The loss of sight in one eye has given him an advantage in depicting shadows.”
“He has, then, acquired a valuable infirmity.”
“He has made it valuable. His infirmities and eccentricities are avidly cultivated. His aloofness of manner and careless speech signal an independent spirit free of sycophancy and this bravura elevates the fees he commands. Where another might eat toads to gain favor, Petrinius spits venom and is the more prized. His great mural when finished will stand as one of the most powerful of misanthropic statements. Many in this city shall be furious to recognize themselves therein. If he include representations of their shadows, those will suffer sad decline. The scrap of shadow from the felon Malaspino has lent him more power. Some high-placed persons will be savagely drawn in.”
“‘Tis risky,” I said. “Some there are of the nobility would have him taken off the planet if he set them crossgrain.”
“He depends upon his genius to protect him. Did you note what he said about how the shade was thieved in the first place?”
“He did not know. He said it was neither taken by force nor eased away quietly and subtly.”
“You know the first two ways in which shadows are taken?”
“By stealth,” I said, “and that is called severance. By violence, and that is called sundering. The third I do not know, as you have not yet informed me.”
“Yet you might easily think it out for yourself. How do you acquire a possession of another and leave no trace of theft?”
I was momentarily perplexed. “Well, I suppose, if someone gave the thing to me—”
“If you voluntarily allow someone to take your shadow, it leaves no trace of theft or even of the act of taking. This act is called the surrendering.”
“People do not lightly give up their shadows,” I replied. “Under what circumstance would anyone do so?”
“That is the question I shall put to myself as I sleep. If my pillow is as informative as I hope it shall be, perhaps the three of us may need to wander about the city tomorrow,” Astolfo said. He and Mutano began their silent colloquy again, their fingers flashing like a flock of sparrows in a mulberry.
I left them at it, retired to my solitary, almost barren room, undressed, bedded myself, and slept like a sentry relieved from a six-sandglass watch.
* * * *
On the next morning, after my customary lone and frugal breakfast, I was standing in the east garden. My eyes were closed as I turned round and round, judging the placement of the shadows there. It is an error to suppose, as I had done before entering apprenticeship, that comprehension of shadows is exclusively a matter of the eye. All the senses are engaged. I listened to the breezes as they mingled darker and lighter tints together; I smelled the differences between those plants that were in the shade of wall or tree and those that stood in full sun; I tasted the perfumes of the air with the tip of my tongue; I felt on my face the dapple that fell upon me through the newly leaved plane tree. I heard with special pleasure birdsong, how when it pours from the interior darkness of a thick bush, it lightens and rises minutely in pitch as it trills out of the foliage into the bright day.
I thought that I was aware of all around me, but this illusion was rudely dispelled by a sudden, solid, but not vicious kick to my arse. Mutano, comrade and bear-sized manservant, he who looked as if he would lumber when he walked, could move as silently as any midnight wraith. Astolfo had appointed him my drillmaster and he was forever disciplining me to keener attention, with wooden swords, boxing bouts, equestrian exercises, and so forth. I was grateful to him for his boot up my backside. In another, similar situation an actual opponent could have buried a dagger in my spine.
He beckoned me to follow him into the small library where Astolfo sat in a worn leather armchair. He seemed half asleep when we entered and spoke in a lazy, almost slovenly drawl. This was his mode of speech when his mind was occupied with a problem. “My search has not been fruitless,” he said, “but its results are uncertain. We shall go within the hour to the workplace of the ballet master Maxinnio. Before we leave, you must drink the pot of tea which has been prepared for you. That will give you excuse and opportunity to examine his establishment. Mutano shall serve as our protector, if need be, and also as observer, for, to say truly, I do not know entirely what to expect of this visit. My instinct of the matter may be correct or it may err. At any rate, you and I shall go unarmed, but Mutano will bear his short sword.... And so, prepare.”
As I was bidden, I went to my room, performed brief ablutions, put on a clean doublet, and downed in hasty gulps the pot of tea that had been set out. Then I joined Astolfo and Mutano in the front of the great hall and we departed. Astolfo, I noted, had changed attire and was dressed in the customary gold-and-green trunks and doublet of a spice merchant. If he hoped to disguise himself, this clothing would not suffice. Master-of-shadows Astolfo was recognized by everyone in the city of Tardocco.
* * * *
The door to Maxinnio’s establishment was a shabby, unvarnished affair of oak boards with a small square cut out to see through. It was opened by a girl of ten or twelve years or so in a gray scullery smock; she was unremarkable except for the great, dark, almond-shaped eyes set in her young, impassive face. The eyes seemed older than the smudged face, a feature apart. Silently she showed us up the stairs to the studio salon.
Here were a half-dozen young girls stretching legs and torsos, clothed in the traditional white tights and frilly short skirts. Ranging in age from perhaps twelve to sixteen years, they leapt and pirouetted under the cold eye of a gray-haired chorus mistress. Maxinnio sat upon a campaign stool, looking without much interest upon the girls. The bored lutenist in his spare, wooden chair did not so much as glance at them.
Nor did Astolfo, as he hurried over to bow to Maxinnio and to press his unenthusiastic hand. Mutano and I gave each of the girls close and furtive examination, as we had been instructed to do. For me, such instruction was superfluous. These were remarkably pretty girls, in the very dawning of their beauty. I tried to ignore distraction, to concentrate on what I was looking out for.
“Strange colors for a shadow-thief to wear, Astolfo,” Maxinnio said. “Why such a gaudy getup so early in the day?”
“Is it not jolly? I am happy that my thieving days, if ever there had been any, should lie behind me so that I can sport such livery as this. Today my green-and-gold signifies that I am just now in the service of another, a wealthy spice merchant who does not care to have his identity bruited about.”
“What have I to do with spice merchants, whatever motley they require you to wear?”
“He is wealthy and that datum must interest you.”
“How so?”
“Because he is considering whether he may wish to invest funds in your company of dancers.”
“Did you bring this mass of gold with you, Astolfo, so that you require two ruffians to guard the treasure you bear? Your dumb manservant I have seen before, this Mutton, or whatever he is called.”
“Mutano,” Astolfo said. “He is the most discreet of persons.”
“Let him keep so. But who is this clay-foot ox-goader by his side? He looks as if grasshoppers might spring from his codpiece.”
“He enjoys to be called Falco and I perceive he is in a state of discomfort. I think he may have been swilling ale even at this early hour and, if so, shall not be in my service by this afternoon. Perhaps there is a place here where he may relieve himself.”
“Out the door and down the long hall to the end he will find a pissing room. If some girl has engaged it, he must hold his water until she leaves,” he said, and added: “I do not like the look of this Falco.”
“I plan to improve his appearance,” Astolfo said and waved me away.
Mutano’s bitter tea had worked its way with me so that I fairly trotted down the gloomy hall to an open door within which stood a row of four stoneware pissing jars. No female was in the room, so I closed the door and went about my business, making sure, according to instruction, that my urination would be audible even through the walls. Anyone set to watch me would be satisfied with the legitimacy of my need.
Afterward, I stood listening for a moment, then stole to the door and opened it gradually. The hall was deserted and I went into it, going along slowly and silently, stopping by each of the doors to listen for any sound within.
At the end of the hall was a stairway and I fancied that music sounded from the floor above. I mounted quietly to the door that closed off the stairs at the top. Here I heard distinctly the soft strains of harp music. When I tried to ease the door open, I found it locked and was gratified. To pry back this lock with a short strap of stiff leather was the work of brief moments and anyone inside would be unlikely to guard closely a locked door.
When I inched it ajar and peeped through I could see clearly because a panel of the roof was drawn back and daylight poured down upon a lank, abstracted youth with curly locks who sat playing his harp as if rapt by the music he produced. A girl dressed all in white tights to her neck danced in the sunlight. She did not wear the usual pleated dancer’s skirt.
She could not be above sixteen years and so slender within the white sheath she wore that she looked like a spiral curl of silver as she made a slow turn with her hands held aloft. On her toes she barely touched the floor and so weightless-seeming were her motions that a puff of air might have carried her up and away like the downy dandelion seed. She looked upward, following the line of her arms to her small, long-fingered hands, and her blonde hair hung long and free down her back. She would be the principal dancer of Maxinnio’s troupe and she danced in the shaft of light as the spirit of loneliness, as if she were the only being in a separate world. I felt that in looking upon her I looked upon my own spirit as I sometimes conceived it in melancholy humor—alone and uncompanioned in a moment of halted time, in a place that could not be reached from ordinary space. If every human soul is an orphan, as Astolfo once averred, this young girl embodied the soul of that soul.
I watched her, transfixed for long moments, before I recognized one of the things that caused her to emit such an atmosphere of solitude. Although she danced within a wide beam of full daylight, she cast no shadow on the polished maple floor. Shadowless, she seemed to burn in her space, a cool, silver flame as pure as starlight frozen in ice. The absence of a shadow attached her more closely to the music; she seemed a part of the music, as if when the harpist gently rippled his strings, he was caressing her body with his fingertips, bringing from her, and not his instrument, the strains and measures that fell upon my ears.
With difficulty I brought myself away down the stairs and returned to the salon where Maxinnio and Astolfo held conference among the other dancers. All the way back through the dim, grimy hallway the sight of the silver dancer floated before me. When I came into the room with the harsher light and the different music and the prancing girls, the sensation was disagreeable. Everything, and especially the dancers, seemed tawdry and dull and clumsy. Aforetime I had found the room pleasant enough, but now it was immediately stale, flat, and tiresome.
Astolfo greeted me. “Well, Falco, you have been gone a good long space. I must congratulate you on your bladder capacity. Perhaps we shall engage for you in a pissing tournament.”
“It was tea and not ale that I had drunk,” I said. “My innards are not so avid to entertain mere tea.”
“Must we spend more time hearing how your oaf makes water?” asked Maxinnio. “I hold the subject but a shallow one.”
“Perhaps we have overstrained your hospitality,” said Astolfo. “Now that I have learned from you that you have no desire and no need to open your company to the investment of my client, we may decide our business is concluded.”
“It is concluded, Astolfo,” Maxinnio declared. “I do not know why you have come knocking upon my door, with unsavory fellows at your heel, blathering some suppositious story about a spice merchant. Whatever underhand affair you have underway, I am to be left out. And there’s an end on’t.”
“I am sure you know best,” Astolfo said. He bowed and then Mutano and I bowed and the gray-smocked, great-eyed girl showed us down the stairs to the street. The lute music grew louder behind us.
* * * *
When I told Astolfo about the dancer I had spied upon, we sat in his large kitchen. He enjoyed this room with its enormous oven, its walls glowing with copper pans and kettles, its smells of breads and spices. He liked to leap up backward and perch on the huge butcher block in the center and dangle his feet. This he did now as we drank new ale from clay tankards and chewed on black bread and sour goat cheese.
When I finished my account, he closed his eyes and nodded. “The dancing master must have been asked to prepare an important entertainment for the municipality and has designed a particularly gratifying dance. You glimpsed her in rehearsal, Falco, and were transported. The full spectacle shall surely glow famously.”
“It is a sight worth living to see,” I avowed.
“Maxinnio will not be eager to give over this paragon of dance to Ser Rutilius.”
“He will not give her over,” I said. “Nor would you once you had set eyes upon her.”
“You are certain it is her shadow in the Ser’s cage of glass?”
“It can be no other.”
“Then we must find out our choices. What would Rutilius do if we delayed awhile and then reported to him that we could not trace the caster of his shadow?”
“He would pay others to discover her.”
“How might they do so?”
I thought. “He would tell these others that we had failed. Then they would follow in our footsteps, seeking any sort of intelligence. By that time our visit to Maxinnio’s dancers would be known and they would find the silver dancer and inform Rutilius.”
“When once Rutilius knew that we had seen her, he would consider that—”
“—That we had betrayed him, having designs of our own. He would not be pleased.”
“What of the girl, once he knows where and what she is?”
“He will abduct her, despite all that Maxinnio can do.”
“And then?”
I shrugged. “I cannot say. He shall have attained his desire. He shall possess the girl.”
“The consequence of this possession?”
“I cannot say.”
“There can be but one consequence. Did you gain any impression of her? Not of the dancer, but of the girl apart from the dance?”
I waited, but nothing came to mind. “I think there is no girl apart from the dance.”
He blinked his eyes and nodded once, gravely. “Because she casts no shadow. Like the music itself, she casts no shadow. She has been changed like those boys lopped of their coillons to become soprano singers, pure vessels of the art. Apart from her dance, she hardly exists. Petrinius understood this matter. His drawing of the shadow has more vital spirit, more spark of the soul, than does the shadow itself. And the shadow has more substance of spirit than the girl who cast it.”
“How does this fact serve Rutilius? I see advantage in it only for Maxinnio and the spectacle he is planning.”
“‘Twould serve him ill,” he said, “and ourselves also. We must look for some other avenue of success or of escape.”
“How so?”
He shrugged. “I am a-weary of pondering and drawing up schemes. My wits are not so nimble as formerly. Why do you not tickle the ribs of your ingenuity and produce a plan for us to follow?”
“I shall attempt,” I said. I sounded my words out light and eager, trying to disguise my unconfident apprehension.
“We will await with indrawn breath your masterpiece of machination,” Astolfo said. “You shall deliver it mid-morning tomorrow.”
* * * *
Well, I would have to prepare some scheme or other for the morrow, that was certain. Certain too was the fact that it would be dismissed by the shadow master as harebrained, lackwitted, and impossible of execution. So I did not trouble myself deeply about the matter and took his words to imply that this evening was mine to consume in whatever way I desired.
And so I launched out across Tardocco to The Heart of Agate, these days my favored tavern in which to recreate body and mind. It was there, between bouts of tankards and of bed-thumping, during one of those floating moments when I began to doubt the value of such dissipation, that a glimmer of a notion entered my head and I abruptly and unsteadily betook me homeward. It was no thunderbolt conception, but even so I did not want to drown it in ale-engendered forgetfulness.
* * * *
I rose late, only just before the appointed hour, composed my corpus as best I could, and went out of doors to greet Astolfo where he sat in the springtime splendor under the great chestnut in the east garden. He eyed me with humorous disdain, shook his head, but said nothing. Mutano, standing by a small rustic table, poured a foaming beaker of ale from a pitcher with a cracked spout. I tried to turn from the sight and smell of it, but he thrust it upon me and I drank and began to feel a little better. He had infused it with some sort of spice that so inflamed the palate I had to fumble for speech when Astolfo put his question.
“You cannot gauge with what eager anticipation we have waited your proposal,” he said gaily. “Speak at once and dispel our anxiety.”
It hurt to swallow, but after I had done so, I said, “Did not you tell me that Ser Rutilius spent much of his youth in headstrong dissipations and carefree frivolities?”
He made no answer, so I plunged on. “He must have sown wild seed during this time. Perhaps he has fathered one or two that he knows nothing of. Perhaps he could be persuaded that the dancer is one of these, his own daughter.”
“What then?”
“Then he can have no use for her as bedmate and will leave her stay as is.”
“Yet he already adores her shadow to distraction. Will he not be proud to acknowledge the work of his flesh, seeing what dear loveliness it hath brought forth? Will he not be more avid than ever to have her within his house?”
“As his daughter—that is, as his supposed daughter—she may prevail upon him to accede to her wishes.”
“And will not a young girl of no fortune, apprenticed to a stiff-willed tyrant of the ballet, be pleased to find a wealthy and doting father and enter into a life of luxurious ease and well being?”
“Not if she be wedded to her dance and its music,” I replied. “And that is what I saw when I watched her. It is difficult to imagine that she would give up the art willingly.”
“Willingly she gave up her shadow.”
Now I began to falter. “But that—that is different....”
He spoke as if from the depths of lassitude, saying the very phrase I had foreknown. “This will not serve. The risks are too threatening.” But then he surprised me. “And yet, there is something in’t to ponder on. Let us befriend our thoughts a while longer. You can be meditating upon it while Mutano instructs you in the brave art of the whip. The whip is a way of taking shadows you may not yet have considered.”
* * * *
Three days passed in which Astolfo seemed to neglect all this affair, the commission of Ser Rutilius, Maxinnio, and the shadowless dancer. I kept busy, of course; my training seemed never to abate for two hours together. Now the emphasis was on drawing. I had been put for a space of time last twelvemonth to draw the shapes of shadows splayed across irregular surfaces: the shadow of Mutano as he stood at the corner of the clay-walled springhouse in the back garden so that it appeared halved on both walls, the shadow of the black cat Creeper where he crouched by the rough stones of the outer wall, the shadow of my own left hand as it fell upon a clot of harebells.
It was discovered that I possessed no handy talent as a draughtsman, but Astolfo explained that the case was of small moment. This exercise was to train my discernment of the shapes surfaces might make of umbrae; it was a study in recognitions.
But this new regimen of drawing was less a geometry exercise and more in the vein of art. I sat with a sheaf of paper, trying to render likenesses not of shadows but of their casters: garden urns, hyacinths, quince bush, the sleeping form of Creeper, the huge hands of Mutano. Now and again Astolfo would stop by, leaf through a handful of my drawings, and with a finely pointed length of graphite make swift corrections. Each of his strokes was a revelation and, though I learned much in a short time, it was clear that I was destined to be no Manoni or Petrinius and I felt, as I often had before, that hours were misspent.
I was pleased, therefore, when Astolfo informed me we were to pay another call upon Maxinnio and that I should prepare to answer certain questions that might be put to me. “I do not foresee that he will query you,” Astolfo said, “but it is ever best to prepare. You are to recall each detail about the dancer you saw who has no shadow. If you are asked, you must answer truthfully.”
“He will not be glad to find we know of her,” I said. “If he offer to fight, shall I combat him?”
“I do not think you would fare brilliantly in swordplay with a dancing master. We must soon lesson you in dancing to lessen your pudding-footed lubbardness.”
“But if he offer fight?”
“He will not,” Astolfo said. “Go ready yourself. We leave within the hour.”
* * * *
Yet when we set out again Astolfo had buckled on that sword he called Deliverer. This time he did not bedeck himself in the cut and colors of a spice merchant, all green and gold, but wore his ordinary habit of russet doublet and trunks, and soft boots whose floppy tops concealed ingenious pockets. He carried now a rolled case of pliable leather, the sort used to transport largish maps.
We walked at leisurely pace into this seedy square of town with its sleepy shops of tailors and shoemakers, tinkers and tapsters. When we knocked at the street door of Maxinnio’s establishment, it was opened again by the young girl who had attended us before. This time, at Astolfo’s suggestion, I observed her more closely, but she was only as I remembered: a thin little thing of medium stature, with the jet hair and the great dark eyes that shone like wet obsidian. Of her figure in the dingy, gray scullery smock I could tell little.
When she led us into the rehearsal salon, the scene was as before, with the severe ballet mistress yapping crossly at her charges, the bored lutenist fingering along in rote fashion, and the lanky Maxinnio on his leather campaign stool, rapping the floor rhythmically with a short silver-headed cane.
He did not weep with joy at our appearance. “Here are you again, Astolfo,” he snapped. “It seems you feel bound by some compulsion I cannot fathom to honor me with your presence and with the company of your overgrown henchmen.”
“I bid you good morrow,” Astolfo said in his mild voice.
“Have you auctioned off all your store of spices? I see you fitted today in a more customary livery.”
“Today I come in my own interest and not in that of the merchant.”
“That merchant who did not exist in the first place.”
“That is true,” Astolfo said. “But you must not complain of being deceived. You did not credit my tale from the beginning. I had not really thought to deceive someone so perspicacious as Maxinnio.”
“Now I sniff arrant trickery,” he replied. “I warn you that if I grow impatient with your pitiable ruses, I shall have my troupe of young girls pitch you through the window onto the cobblestones. They will likewise defenestrate these two footpads that hang to you like baubles on earlobes.”
“Cry you mercy,” said Astolfo. “The day is too shiny new; a shame if violence should mar it. I came only to acquaint you with some intelligence that may not yet be in your possession.”
“You came to monger gossip? I think you will not expect to be paid for this intelligence, as you call it.”
“Only look upon these drawings I have brought. I am curious to know your judgment of these works.” He untied the laces of the leather case and began to unroll it.
“The only artworks in which I am now interested are the designs for my new ballet,” Maxinnio said. “The preparatory sketches are useless and we must begin them anew.”
“But only glance at this bit of handiwork.” Astolfo unrolled a drawing on fine-wove paper and held it up before the dance master.
When Maxinnio blinked his eyes wide and gave a start that shook his whole body, I edged around to see what image must produce such reaction. I judged it would be in our interest for me to give but a lackadaisical, cool look at the drawing, but when I saw the figure there I too was surprised and intook my breath audibly. Maxinnio did not notice, staring fixedly, oblivious to all else.
Here was the dancer without a shadow, the girl I had spied through the cracked door on the floor above. This was her face uplifted, her figure weightless and elongated, her arms raised above her flowing hair, her slender hands thrusting into the light of day. My late exercises in art, clumsy as they had been, gave me to appreciate, to savor, the achievement that lay on the sheet Astolfo upheld.
When Maxinnio turned his eyes from the drawing to the shadow master, his face was full of rage, every feature contorted. He looked for all the world like one of those small statues of demons that are set out to fend away evil spirits from temple gardens. When he spoke, his voice was low, choking with fury. “I would have your life for this.”
“My henchmen, as you name them, will answer for my safety,” Astolfo said. “Anyway, why do you threaten? I have brought this exquisite picture as a gift for you.”
“This dancer is my secret. She is the guarantee of my success with the new entertainment. I do not understand how you come by her likeness. She has not been seen abroad. I keep her close. No one is to see her until the ballet of The Sylphs of Light is presented in the new season.”
“She will not appear in your dance of sylphs. She will never dance in public.”
“She must. All is settled and cast as in stone.”
“You have rescued from a meager and grudging life many a young girl,” Astolfo said. “You have made the pliable ones into dancers and found employment for some of the others. But your interest in them reaches only so far as the boundary of your professional purposes. You know little of where they come from or who they are or may have been.”
“I maintain neither orphanage nor almshouse,” Maxinnio said. “The girls learn to be not persons but only dancers. They learn to live solely for dance, as I do live.”
“And that is why you do not know even the true name of this girl. That is how you could with impunity strip her of her shadow, sell it away so she could not retrieve it, and present her onstage in perfect purity.”
“I could easily rid them all of their shadows. But only this one embodies the ideal I search for. It is not shadow-lack that composes her perfection.”
“But I have found that she is the natural daughter of a great and powerful noble who does not care to have her prance before the garlicky, mutton-gorging rabble. You are to hand her over to me to deliver to him and thus spare your own life and the lives of those in your employ, saving too the razement of this place to smoking embers.”
“Who is this giant terror you threaten me with?”
“You shall not know that.”
“How do I know that he exists?”
“Because I tell you so and have the picture of her.... Here, look you upon this other likeness. What do you observe?” Astolfo rolled up the drawing of the dancer and gave it to Mutano who secured it with a black satin ribbon. Then he unfurled another drawing and held it up as before.
Maxinnio gave this new image a puzzled glance, then leaned forward in his little chair and peered closely. “I think I know this shadow,” he said, “but I cannot say how.”
“It is the shadow of your silver dancer, the shade you bartered away.”
He shook his head. “No. Her shadow is a thing of unparalleled grace. There is something askew about the drawing of this one. It is impaired. It looks as if some wasting disease has befallen it, some distemper that wracks its shape.”
“That is the condition it has acquired since it left your hands. This drawing depicts how it now looks at this moment and I shall deliver it to the girl’s father. From this picture of her shadow he will draw conclusions about how she is being treated here. When his anger is at its flaming peak, I shall tell him your name and show him where to seek you out.”
“You would play me false and destroy me and my work ... for what purpose? There has been no enmity between us. I hold you in perfect indifference. If you go to ruin me, it will be only in order to fatten your purse.”
“The father will reward me when his daughter is restored to him. There may be payment also for you.”
“I care not.” Maxinnio clenched and unclenched his hand, rapped the floor with his ebony cane. “Heap your coin till it drown you. My concern is with my Sylphs of Light. If I could spare my silver dancer, she should go to her father on wings of wind. But the entertainment cannot afford her absence.”
Astolfo gave the picture of the shadow to Mutano who rolled it up and secured it with a red ribbon. “And now, if you will examine this third rendering.” He unscrolled before Maxinnio a last drawing, a likeness of another young dancer. The pose was the same as in the picture of the silver girl, but this girl had black hair instead of blonde and the eyes that gazed sunward were of shining onyx. Though not so tall as the other girl, she was equally graceful, a creature of calm and guileless movement, with the ease of brook water.
Maxinnio looked at it with grave care. “This is an interesting fantasy of what a dancer might aspire to. No one but Petrinius could have drawn it so, but it is not a study from life. If ‘twere, I would find the girl and put her to use.”
“The drawing is not taken from life, but the girl is real enough. You may be acquainted with her. She is called Leneela.”
“I think not,” Maxinnio said. “The one Leneela I know is but a little servant girl is our household. She has been sweeping stones and scrubbing floors and pots for three years now since her mother died.”
“This is she.”
“If it be she, how could I not recognize her in this guise?”
“She is so customary to your eyes that she became invisible.”
“She is no dancer, only a scullery maid.”
“She can be trained.”
“In time, perhaps, if she have ability. But time is short.”
“You speak as if you had choice in the matter. The father will claim his silvery daughter. I have but offered you another to take her place. There is no cost to you except a delay in presenting your Sylphs. You can bargain a deferment.”
“That will not be simple and will incur further expense.”
“Expenses will be compensated. Again, I tell you that you have no choice. A carriage will call for the girl at first twilight. You will ascertain that she is in the best of condition and will hand her into the carriage yourself. To join a child with its parent—that is a handsome thing to do.”
“Handsome or foul-featured, it shall be done. Yet I will not forget this tiresome japery you have turned upon me.”
“I have secured your life,” Astolfo said.
* * * *
It was early evening before the three of us came together again, sitting at a table laid out in the kitchen, dividing an enormous beef and kidney pie Astolfo had besought from the cooks. A cask of aged cider stood ready to ease down the meat. The shadow master had traveled earlier in the day to the chateau of Rutilius and arranged how the girl was to come into his household.
“I hope this will prove a fortunate event for the lass,” I said. “‘Tis a sorrow, her loss to the art of the dance.”
He nodded gaily and said he was obliged to me for a happy thought.
“How so?”
“I have told Ser Rutilius that I believe her to be his natural daughter and pointed out several similarities of feature and physique. You suggested some such thing. We may well have preserved the both of them from destruction.”
“Destruction?”
“One who falls in love with a shadow loves an image of the ideal. No woman can approach to the perfection of such a fond delusion. When disappointment and disillusion set in, a rank distaste for the fleshly person follows, for she will be seen as a betrayer of the ideal, a spoiler of the perfection that once gloriously existed. In a passionate man, revenge will come to seem a necessity. The blade, the noose, the poison goblet stand forth in the mind, palpable and inescapable. There is none so desperate, none so dangerous, as one whose ideals have crumbled.”
“It is well to deceive him then, in the matter of blood ties,” I said.
“If indeed we have deceived. It is yet plausible that she is his own.”
“Will he not go now to seek the mother and verify your story?”
“Alas!” Astolfo cried. “In my vivid account, the mother was strangled by a jealous lover and thrown into the harbor. The sea laves her sorrowful bones ceaselessly.”
“And this lover? Shall not Ser Rutilius look for his track?”
“Alack! He has repented himself and lives in exile in the Fog Islands, leading a solitary, miserable existence lamenting the excesses of his former life.”
“A pretty fable. But there are yet matters I do not comprehend. How was it possible for Petrinius to make the three drawings? He had seen neither of the girls and he had no way to observe how the shadow had deteriorated.”
“I knew that he would have made a copy for his own collection of the drawing he made for Rutilius. I asked him to make another, only altering it as if the shadow had started to deteriorate.”
“And the girls? I do not comprehend how he could have seen either of them without his presence at Maxinnio’s establishment being remarked.”
“Petrinius did not see either girl.”
“How then did he make their likenesses?”
“He made none.” Astolfo swallowed heartily from his mug of cider, set it down, and wiped his mouth with his wrist. “But there are others in this land who can draw besides that vain and impertinent artist. In fact, I have been known to dash off a sketch now and then, sometimes in the manner of Manoni, or the Anonymous Citadel Master, or even in the style of Petrinius himself.”
“You produced those fine drawings? But you did not see the silver dancer. You were in the salon below, distracting Maxinnio from my prying.”
“I made attentive note of your description of her,” he said. “And then, of course, there was Petrinius’s rendering of her shadow. Look you, Falco, if a person may cast a shadow, why may not a shadow cast a person?”
“A shadow may cast—”
“—Can cast the image of a girl, at least. Think upon your own lustful and lurid fancies. Do they not result in some kind of physical manifestation? But please do not tell us of it. I am a modest man and easily embarrassed.”
Have you ever wondered how a mute person laughs? In Mutano’s case, laughter takes the form of a gruesomely huge grin, a thunderous pounding of tabletop and thighs, and plenteous tears streaming from the corners of the eyes.